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The first thing he knows when he wakes up is darkness and hunger.
There is nothing else, no perception of self, no beginning or end — there is darkness and there is an all-encompassing hunger, and that hunger is the only thing he — if there is a he and not just an it - can be. It is a void inside made of pure madness that demands to be filled or to die.
The darkness is not for a lack of light, for his eyes see just as well with or without it, but the inability of the senses to function after so long in dormancy. The lack of awareness only contributes to the isolation in the vastness of the hunger. It is a miracle that his hands find the glass and can open it to drink, but those predatory instincts will die very, very hard.
Even with those few flasks, it is not enough. He is still hunger, but beneath that, he is something — someone — else. And he is awake. That means something, he knows, a something that slowly rises to the surface despite the smothering of the runes drawn around him, urging all else to look away, look aside, to shield a hiding place until the time was right. Their swoops and curves were drawn by familiar hand.
The first thing he knows is that Dracula is dead. The next is his name.
Leon lays weakly in nest that has been a resting place for God knows how long, dust coating everything, including him. He paws at his face to wipe it off. Leon is awake. Dracula — Mathias — is dead. Mathias is dead. Leon is alive … by some definition of the word, maybe. Leon is alive. Leon is awake.
Slowly, he extends his senses to the world beyond his immediate self, but it is difficult. It's hard to say that he can hear anything, actually, because it's all silent, deadly so. Maybe he's just not awake enough, but he can lay here forever and calcify, or …
So Leon pushes himself onto his hands and knees and digs his claws into the panel in the wall. It takes more effort than it should to open it, but slowly, Leon finds his feet and staggers out.
The Belmont Hold is indeed silent. For awhile there is so, so much dust, but while Leon finds that confusing he cannot think past it to make a connection. The farther Leon goes the more he can make out footprints, movement, things shifted and candles recently lit. Life. Life. But beyond that, Leon finds something infinitely more terrifying — demons. Blood and night creatures, shattered shelves and books scattered across the floor. This is death and carnage, recently left, and there is a buzzing in the back of his skull that only grows louder with the more he finds. Leon follows the trail and gazes up into the night through the jagged hole that had once been the staircase and entrance.
There is that terrible portrait of him, looking down at the disaster beneath. It may as well be a stranger.
Leon is too dazed to figure out what is going on, and it's a struggle to climb out of the pit. He needs blood, needs it more than he's ever felt in his life, both short and long as it is — he is just barely Leon, eclipsed by hunger.
But when Leon emerges from the Hold, the emptiness inside him grows impossibly larger.
The Belmont Estate is … gone. Obliterated, a ruin. Blackened beams grown over by ivy, a veritable trash heap with nothing, nothing, left. He stumbles toward it like a man possessed, and he would be hyperventilating if he could as he realizes that the weeds are old, that there is no smell of ash, this is old, this is —
Leon's shaky hands grasp for nothing, at his dusty cloak and hair, and he moans, unable to stop it. "No, no, no, God, please, oh, God, please, no,"
He stumbles around the ruins weeping, sobbing, broken open from the inside out, and when he finally has to turn away because if he looks at it a moment longer he will stand here until the sun comes up —
The night sky is blacked out by a larger shadow, towering above him. Mathias' damned castle, a monument to all his sin.
It's all too much. Leon flees into the woods and lets hunger guide him like a shot, because he has no other recourse. He hasn't the energy to change into a wolf's form, but he does not need it to hunt and kill. He rips apart the first rabbit he finds, followed by a wild turkey, a stag, and drinks deeply of them until his hands and face are smeared with blood and he is a thing of wild grief and delirium. He does not know how far away he runs, only that when he crawls into shelter before the sun comes up that from wherever he is, he cannot see the castle on the horizon any longer.
Is he tired because he cannot shake off however-long he's been in that comatose slumber, or because of the daylight? Or is because of how he shakes uncontrollably, has been that way since he saw the house, his house, his home, his children's home, his grandchildren's home —
Head tucked against his chest, Leon is sobbing again, keeping his eyes closed so he cannot even risk seeing the sunlight, thinking about what it may mean — but he needs answers. Where is his family, if not here? There were dead night creatures in the Hold, who could have … Leon can't quite complete the thoughts, between grogginess and hysteria. All he can think is that he was not there. He has slept while his family's legacy has burned, and he was not there. He slept and his family — the home — it burned —
At some point he remembers that Mathias is dead. Leon could not be awake otherwise. Mathias is dead, his castle casting its shadow over the Belmont Estate — destroyed — destroyed, yes, but not recently, which does not — and yet the Hold was broken into and was all blood and death and — and it hurts in every way to think about because as of yet Leon cannot make any sense of it.
He is so afraid to sleep again, like he might wake up in another world. Maybe none of this is real, maybe he has never woken at all. Maybe someone found him and staked him, and this is Hell!
Leon doesn't sleep at all, even though it is a struggle. He is too afraid that he will lose his last grasp on himself otherwise.
He staggers out into the moonlight when the sun is gone and wanders until he finds water. He kneels at the pond's edge, and despite all efforts (weak, still) he finds himself staring at his face, pale and bloody. His eyes are sunken, haggard, and Leon is still so, so hungry. He is a ghost of the man in the portrait in the Hold and maybe there is no place in this world for him, now.
Leon sinks his hands into the water and watches the red cloud grow as the blood washes off, before splashing his face clean. He does not intend to be seen by strangers, but if … if he can find what he's looking for, he should look … he should try and look presentable. He will scare them, otherwise.
Leon is so tired. But he needs answers.